This is the site for Australian visual journalist and writer Paul Amyes.

Adobe Photoshop

The island of Santorini is literally the remains of a volcano that blew up. Much of the settlement lies on the edge of the caldera looking into what would have been the heart of the volcano.

We went to the Greek Island of Santorini in 1987. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited with the white buildings contrasting with the incredibly blue sea and sky.

Church Bell Tower, Thira, Santorini.

Going before the start of the tourist season also helped – it meant that most of the island was deserted. Many of the locals would not winter on the island preferring to move to the mainland.

Paradise Video-Music Pub, Thira, Santorini.

It was as though we almost had the island to ourselves and we walked around taking in the scenery and photographing with gay abandon. By the standards of the digital age we didn’t shoot very much, but then shooting twenty rolls of film while on a weeks holiday was a big deal.

Island of Churches

My entry for the Nepal Earthquake made me look closely at my slide and negative archive, and what I found was not pretty. Most of the images from the 1980’s are in pretty bad shape. I’ve been meticulous about storing my images but the dyes used in the E6 and C41 films were not stable and they have faded. The Kodachrome images have fared significantly better. So I’ve embarked on a scanning frenzy. I’m using an old Canon flatbed scanner which allows me to batch scan and gives sufficient quality to make an A3 print. At present I’m only restoring a few of the pictures, the important thing at the moment is to digitize them, and get them into Lightroom with captions and key words. These pictures went through Lightroom and Photoshop, but I still wasn’t able to completely restore them so I thought I’d embrace the “distressed” look so I ran them through the desktop version of Snapseed.